There are approximately 2.5 million honey bee colonies in the United States. These colonies increase crop yields by an estimated $12-14 billion. Honey bee colonies are susceptible to poisoning from pesticides and pollutants and thus the hives must be monitored daily. Further, pollination efficiency can be assessed and regulated by monitoring hive welfare.
Using current technologies, routine management of bee colonies requires time consuming on-site visual inspection of each hive. Although this may not be a problem for a beekeeper with a few hives, it becomes a major cost factor to a beekeeper who makes most or all of his or her living by managing hundreds to tens of thousands of hives. In addition, because many beekeepers practice migratory beekeeping, their colonies may be distributed over large geographic areas. For example, in the United States, it is not uncommon for a migratory beekeeper to move and deploy hives all the way from California to Minnesota, or from Florida to the Dakotas.
Various contrivances have been built to monitor beehive activity, consisting of an assortment of mechanical systems, hydraulic devices, heat sensors and oscillating cylinders, weight systems, and counting systems. Virtually all of these devices are highly imprecise and require constant maintenance. Simple sensors such as temperature probes are sometimes used to monitor colonies. Simple spring-mounted or electronic balance scales are used to weight hives. In 1969, Spangler published the details of a photoelectric counting device for hives to monitor the number of outgoing and incoming bees (J. Econs. Entomol., 62, 1183-1184). Struye et al. described a microprocessor-controlled monitoring unit to record honey bee flight at the hive in 1994 (Apidologie 25, 184-195). A group of bee counters named BeeScan, Apiscan, and Bumblescan sold by Lowland Electronics bvba, Belgium (BE101105A6) were developed using Struye's work. The counters incorporated two infra-red detectors on a single chip, separated by a microgap. The counters can resolve a separation of 1 mm between bees which reduces the chance of miss counting bees as they move head to tail through the counter. These counters, have an on-hive microprocessor and liquid crystal display (LCD) but they simply count bees. Programming the microprocessor is laborious and the unit is costly. Data from the BeeScan must be collected at the hive or can be downloaded to a portable computer. Although the BeeScan must be collected at the hive or can be downloaded to a portable computer. Although the BeeScan units are reliable, data from the counters can not be downloaded in continuous mode or ported to a communications network. In addition, the counter pools all data from all of the 32 ingress/egress passageways, making it impossible to separate and compare sequential signals from each passageway.
Better bee management increases honey production, reduces bee loss and improves pollination efficacy. Honey bee colonies can be used to assess environmental health, and more recently are being used to locate harmful materials, including chemicals and biological warfare agents, as well as devices such as land mines. A bee monitoring system can be used to study the toxic and sub-lethal (behavioral) effects of exposure to pesticide in the field revolutionizing pesticide investigations as well as providing a much improved method for assessing the hazard of new formulations as part of the required EPA label registration process. An integrated bee monitoring system would allow remote monitoring of honey bee activity and colony welfare as well as provide remote control of sampling devices or instruments for the collection of agents of harm. No such system currently exists.